Whimsy gets a workout in British director Danny Boyle's Millions, the second movie he has made about stumbling into a stash of cash, although nothing like his meaner, career-making Shallow Grave (1994). For one thing, his new picture is about children and, to some extent, geared toward them.

Heaven-sent: Damian (Alex Etel) is visited by the saints, who advise him to do good.

Fox Searchlight Pictures

Brothers Anthony (Lewis McGibbon) and Damian (Alex Etel) have recently lost their mother and moved out of the city with their dad (James Nesbitt) into a new Liverpool housing development.

Anthony, 9, is a math-whiz numbers cruncher, while imaginative Damian, 7, is hung up on religiosity and saints. This is why fantasy-prone Millions is one of the few "caper" movies you'll ever see in which Francis of Assisi appears. (Related video: Watch a clip from Millions)

It becomes a caper movie because a bag of banknotes (200,000 pounds-plus) comes flying off a train and through the air, landing near the ramshackle tunnel of packing boxes Damian has constructed by the railroad tracks.

Returning the money is never much of an issue; Anthony figures the investment angles, Damian the altruistic ones. But there's a time-pressure catch, and here's where the story gets more complicated.

Britain is just days away from converting to the euro, which will render the notes useless for anything but kindling or perhaps the highest-stakes Monopoly game ever.

Thus, an already busy movie (including CGI effects gone wild) gets a little clogged with the time-clock countdown, lonely Dad's new squeeze (who the boys suspect covets the money), a school Christmas pageant, and the stalking thug who took the money in the first place and is under the same time constraints to get it back.

Millions mostly avoids being cloying but flirts with being precious. Yet Boyle is enough of a stylist to make it all passable. It's one of those films for which fans and detractors can see the others' viewpoint.

Boyle enthusiasts also might find the movie a bit soft after the edginess of Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and 28 Days— yet truth is, this is a filmmaker who also has done The Beach and that wacko Ewan McGregor-Cameron Diaz comedy A Life Less Ordinary.